Subject: Re: Why does gnumeric depend on xscreensaver-gnome?
To: Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com>
From: Dan Winship <danw@ximian.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 02/12/2001 11:59:08
> What do people install gnome-core _for_? If it's to get gnome-session,
> and run gnome, people would ask where the screensaver is. If it's only
> to run gnome apps like gtop and gnumeric, maybe users would be better
> served if those packages only depended on controlcenter plus whatever
> libs they actually needed.

I suspect that gnumeric depends on gnome-core so that
gnome-help-browser will be installed and you can read the gnumeric
docs. That's just a guess though. (Although I can't think of anything
else in gnome-core gnumeric might care about.)

You can read the docs in any web browser, but gnome-libs sets up the
Help menu to refer to "ghelp:" URLs, which only gnome-help-browser
knows how to handle, so if you don't have gnome-core installed, the
Help menu would be full of dangling links. This could probably be
fixed with a little gnome-libs hackery to make it use file: URLs
instead, and then it would launch mozilla or netscape or whatever was
configured.

Some amount of this will be changing in the upcoming GNOME 1.4 though,
because gnome-help-browser is going away and Nautilus will be the
default help browser (I think).

-- Dan